Machines including large wheel loaders, wheel dozers, or tracked bulldozers may be used for engaging with high impact loads at a construction or mining worksite. Such use may be generally referred to as pile engagement. These machines benefit from high torque and engine speed when engaging with the pile of material. Often these machines are being operated on uneven or unpaved terrain, for example, for transporting a rock pile in a rock-filled mine. One problem that may become cost prohibitive during the lifetime of the machine is tire or track failure. For example, in a mining application, where a rock or other material pierces the tire while there is still a significant amount of tread left. The tire on a wheel may need replacement before a full life cycle of the tire tread wearing thin. This cost of tire or track replacement for a wheel loader, wheel dozer, or tracked bulldozer may represent a large portion of the cost to operate the machine.
In this regard, a problem in the industry is that an operator of the machine is unable to ascertain in enough time to prevent such catastrophic tire failure because there is no sure indicator of a tire slippage until the damage has been realized. This is because even a quarter of a rotation of a tire may result in a deep tear. Such a deep tear lends itself to failure of the tire entirely. Alternatively, all four tires may fail when the tires are spinning together, and therefore slight operator delayed reaction time to reduce the torque delivered to the tires is often too late.
A few devices or techniques for traction control for such machines have been developed that fail to address the above noted problems. Traditional traction control design may attempt to eliminate tire slip in all scenarios. However this can be cost prohibitive as it requires multiple wheel speed sensors, knowledge of the machine's articulation angle, individual wheel speeds as well as a means to eliminate slip for each wheel.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,182,002, entitled “Vehicle acceleration based traction control,” discusses a fraction control system in which a tire spin condition is detected based on measured machine acceleration instead of measured wheel speeds. An electronic controller detects a tire spin condition by computing the acceleration of the vehicle drive shaft and comparing the computed acceleration to an acceleration threshold.
However, prior art approaches, such as the system in the '002 patent, may be expensive to implement, are not configured to determine a state of the machine components for slip determination, such as pile engagement, and/or are not configured to determine state of the machine powertrain for slip determination.